Minimal
music, as opposed to ‘Minimalism’, is an idea, a notion
which can take many forms. The ‘ism’ aspect would seem
to indicate a diminishing of possibilities – a narrowing
of frameworks which can arguably be seen as having started
with Terry Riley’s ‘In C’. Cage’s concept of paring music
into minimal technical means and the ostinato-based worlds
of early Riley, Glass and Reich, the ‘less is more’ viewpoint,
would both seem to have borderless and infinite horizons,
starting from entirely different point of view, and both
having the potential to lead irreversibly into conceptual
cul-de-sacs. Removing the notes entirely and having just
the sounds within whichever space is used for a performance
of the notorious ‘4:33’ might well be the antithesis
of Riley’s extreme-tonal space-filling ostinato. In their
way, both works have rigid boundaries, and ‘4:33’ arguably
has no freedoms whatsoever: the sounds are framed by
a strict time limit, and are corralled into our consciousness
as ‘music’ when all our pre-programmed aesthetic senses
are telling us that these sounds are interruptions, imperfections
into what should be silence. This may be one of the reasons
my cat hates the music on this disc, rating it alongside
some of the worst excesses of free jazz as a conceptual
interruption to his 24-hour nap time.

Thus is the
thirteenth in a series from OgreOgress
featuring previously unreleased or rarely recorded works
by well-known composers, and claims the world premiere
recordings of John Cage’s Twenty-Eight, Twenty-Six
with Twenty-Eight & Twenty-Eight with Twenty-Nine.
The extended 122-minute playing time is thanks to this
release’s 96kHz|24bit Audio DVD format, which should play
on your domestic DVD recorder or computer. It will not
play on conventional CD playing equipment. This would appear
to be a limited edition release, and availability is something
of an issue – I was unable to find it on the usual outlet CDBaby -
though as you can see it is available through MWI's two American
partners, Arkiv and Amazon.

Three takes the recorder, played here by Susanna Borsch, into the spare,
chance-based world of Cage’s number pieces. Cage gives
the option of playing “one or any number of” nine 3-minute
movements between two outer movements, and Borsch gives
us the full works by playing them all. Sustained, vibrato-free
notes are held, starting and stopping in a state of apparent
randomness, the difference in colour and pitch between
different kinds of recorders and the difference between
sound and silence being the only real characteristics
of contrast and recognition. The low notes of the bass-contrabass
recorders can also have an alienating effect, but the
sound is not unlike a baroque portativo organ in a gentle
register. Notes sometimes appear more than one at a time,
and when there are more than two you get chords, which
may or may not create felicitous harmonies. Like a Japanese
garden, the music creates its own world of Zen meditation,
which you can take or leave – neither Cage nor the piece
care one way or the other. The effect is one of extreme
slow-motion and timelessness, but it will only slow your
heartbeat if you can accept it for what it is, and ignore
any preconceptions you may have for the value of musical
content: melody, harmony, contrast, expression...

Twenty-Eight is played here by the Prague Winds. The work can, and is combined
in the subsequent two pieces, with Twenty-Six and Twenty-Nine.
In his booklet notes, Rob Haskins describes all of these
works as “the placid world of Cage’s Number Pieces”,
and indeed, the sound world is one of music drawn out
of silence like glowing strands of silk emerging from
a bath of black dye. The timbre of the instruments is
inevitably a more significant feature than in Three,
but the atmosphere is similar, with long, vibrato-free
notes sounding singly, in dissonance or more often in
consonance, forming an extended slow-motion chorale.
Combining this with the strings of Twenty-Six creates
a building tension like some of Don Ellis’s film music
in ‘The French Connection’ or a highly-strung version
of Louis Andriessen’s De Tijd. Percussion – bowed,
rumbled, tintinnabulating or hissing, is added to the
mix in the combination with Twenty-Nine, and the
extended, slow-moving fields of notes and textures are,
I suspect, a nut few will be really willing to crack
on anything like a regular basis. There is however a
grinding fascination in this music. To my mind, it relates
to the kind of horror-minimalism expressed in a piece
like Gavin Bryars’ ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’. Vast,
undiscovered tracts of strangeness are created in these
pieces, and as a result they possess their own inner
strength and stimulating energy for anyone willing to
bathe in their perilously dark and unfathomable waters.

If
you are intrigued by Cage’s number music and able to
find a copy, I can only recommend this disc as a unique
sound-document with which you can give yourself and your
neighbours nightmares whenever the mood takes. Once you
have heard Twenty-Six with Twenty-Eight I can
guarantee you will have a hard time getting it out of
your system. This is not a disc for the faint hearted,
and, while they are in no way mutually exclusive, more
for the fans of Morton Feldman than those of Fauré.

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